The only ones who never ran for president were the
one (Agnew) who took a no-contest plea to tax charges
and the one (Cheney) who had so much power behind the
scenes, the presidency would have looked like a
comedown.

Joe Biden has been running for public office since he
was 27 years old. It might take the end of the world to
shut him down.

What will Jack do next?

Jack Markell already has put together one of the most
successful careers in modern Delaware politics. He
ousted a four-term Republican treasurer to win his first
statewide office in 1998 and bested John Carney in a
Democratic primary on his way to the governorship in
2008. He was re-elected in a rundown economy with a
dazzling 69 percent of the vote.

Markell is the chair of the National Governors
Association. He is a past chair of the Democratic
Governors Association. This is not the look of a man who
intends to settle back and take advantage of the early
bird special at the local diner anytime soon.

The speculation that Markell will leave the
governorship before the end of his second term -- for a
Cabinet post or anything else -- sounds unwise.

It is one thing to depart mid-term as treasurer to
become governor. The treasurer's most important act,
after all, is creating a signature facsimile to go on
all the state checks. It is something else to ditch a
state that has been entrusted to him and all of the
people who are counting on him. Besides, governors love
being governor.

Whatever Markell does next, it is a cinch knowing
what he will never do again. Like Pete du Pont, Mike
Castle, Tom Carper and Ruth Ann Minner, he cannot run
for governor as long as he lives. It takes two terms to
reach that stratified air. Either that, or a felony
conviction.

What happens when five ambitions have to merge
into four offices?

The Democrats have clogged up politics with Markell
as governor, Tom Carper and Chris Coons as senators,
John Carney as congressman, Matt Denn as lieutenant
governor and Beau Biden as attorney general, all of them
elected statewide at least twice.

Carper, who will be 66 next month, will be departing
eventually. It leaves five of them -- Markell, Coons,
Carney, Denn and Biden -- trying to shoehorn themselves
into the four premier offices as two senators, a
congressman and a governor.

It certainly looks like somebody is going to have to
be the odd man out. On the bright side, at least Joe
Biden got out of their way.

Can it get any worse for the Delaware Republicans?

Yes. Christine O'Donnell could run for senator again
in 2014, when Coons is up for re-election, and the
Democrats could take out Tom Wagner, the auditor, to
shut out the Republicans from all nine of the statewide
offices.

Has anybody checked the Mayan calendar? Maybe it only
predicted the end for the Republicans.